Tapping the Collective Wisdom of the Meetings and Events Industry

Introduction

I’ve had the privilege of contributing to two “industry thought collection” pieces assembled by Kenji Crosland (@KenjiCrosland). Kenji assembled the pieces for one of his clients, eVenues, a marketplace for meeting and event spaces. You can find the two pieces here:

These pieces provide great value to eVenues: traffic, awareness, thought leadership and perhaps sales leads and new business. To get some insights on how Kenji pulls it off, I did a Q&A with him.

Q&A with Kenji Crosland

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself.

A: Since I moved from Tokyo to Seattle about 2 years ago, I’ve been helping startups like eVenues with their SEO and content marketing strategy. I have been working with eVenues closely for over a year to help drive traffic to their site.

Q: Tell us about eVenues?

A:eVenues is an online marketplace for meeting spaces, bookable by the hour or day. Over the last three years the company has evolved from a instant booking service and scheduling system for participating venues, to a fast response lead generation system for venues and space seekers.

Not only do we list spaces, but we now have the “virtual concierge” technology to help renters find what they need without being overwhelmed by options. This last innovation has served us well and has propelled our growth.

Q: What inspired you to assemble these “industry thought collection” pieces?

A: I’m always on the lookout for great content in other industries that manage to get a lot of links/tweets/and shares. I saw a similar “industry thought collection” piece for a completely different industry and thought it would be a good fit for the meetings industry as well.

Q: What benefit have you (or eVenues) derived from them?

A: These pieces have helped establish our blog as an important resource for those who wish to keep abreast of the meetings industry. It shows to potential clients and customers that we aren’t “just another startup” trying to disrupt an industry that we don’t know anything about.

One secondary benefit of these posts is the number of links that they attract, thus helping boost our domain authority. The higher our domain authority, the higher our listings rank in the search results.

Q: How did you find and recruit contributors outside of your network?

A: The first place I looked was the list of eVenues’ twitter followers. While technically a twitter follower is already a connection it’s a relatively weak one. I sent very short direct messages asking influential followers in the meetings industry if they wanted to contribute to the post. Because they were already following eVenues, there was already a bit of credibility established. That made it easy to move forward.

I did, however, reach out to complete strangers outside of the eVenues network. I compiled a list of influential people in the meetings industry and used an email finding tool (http://linksy.me/find-email) to make the first approach. I’ve found this tool extremely helpful for content marketing outreach purposes. This tool is a marketer’s dream and I don’t share this it lightly because of the potential for abuse, but I figure the readers here will use it for good and not for evil.

Q: Do you edit any of the contributions?

A: I’ve had to shorten some submissions slightly and have made small wording and typo fixes. I make sure to send a preview to contributors before the post is published so they can see changes made if there are any.

Q: Are there any online tools you use that help you put these together?

A: I mainly use Gmail to keep submissions organized. When anyone sends me a submission to a post I’ll move it into a folder like “2013 trends post”. This makes it easy to keep track of who submitted and who I may need to follow up with. No special tools other than that.

Q: Approximately how much time does it take you to do one of these?

A: It takes about a week and a half to do all outreach, collect submissions and create the post.

Q: What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to someone looking to do something similar in their industry?

A: Most people, no matter how much of a big deal they may seem, are probably more accessible than you think. You’d be surprised how many of them are willing to take the time to share their knowledge and experience.

2013 Predictions for the Meeting Industry

With a younger generation rethinking large events with such meetings as barcamps and unconferences, we’ll see small meetings take a bigger chunk of the pie. Although events will get smaller, they will likely become more frequent and informal, meaning a quicker turnaround when it comes to dealing with suppliers.

The content of the event is much more likely to be recorded and distributed through online channels, either for SEO/content marketing purposes or selling the content itself.

Finally, the industry will be surprised by the actual revenue generated by the “hidden planner”. Typically these are planners that spend 1% of their time “planning a day meeting or event”. eVenues has begun to partner with many and will continue to increase the marketing efforts to capture this data and report back to the industry.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 at 6:05 AM and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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